Ticketfly builds concert app from the ashes of its WillCall acquisition

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WillCall had great design and community, but didn’t have tickets to the best concerts. Ticketfly had deep relationships with music venues, but no one was using it to discover shows. Today, Ticketfly’s acquisition of WillCall comes full circle.

The question is whether people will find Ticketfly’s app valuable given that it’s an incomplete list of nearby concerts. Unlike ticketing service-agnostic discovery apps like Songkick or BandsInTown, Ticketfly only highlights shows it sells tickets for directly. If a concert is sold through TicketMaster, EventBrite, or another service, it won’t show up in Ticketfly’s app.

WillCall co-founder turned Ticketfly general manager Donnie Dinch says in the future the app could show inventory from other ticketers. But for now he admits the deficiency, saying “people will primarily use this as a way to access their tickets for shows they’ve purchased through Ticketfly.”

But Ticketfly did build in one of WillCall’s best features: curation. Oftentimes you won’t know the music of every artists playing in your city each night. Thankfully, Ticketfly’s community team will hand-pick featured shows you won’t want to miss. Ticketfly’s app also lets you search through its 90,000 shows per year, and store billing information for rapid two-tap payment. Users can pull up the digital copies of their tickets on the app when they get to the venue door.

WillCall co-founder and Ticketfly GM Donnie Dinch

Ticketfly is also co-opting one of the most beloved features of its comprehensive concert discovery competitors. You’ll be able to set up notifications for your favorite artists to find out when their tickets go on sale so you can score some even if they sell out in seconds.

But perhaps the biggest opportunity here is how Ticketfly’s new native app could interact with Pandora, which acquired the ticketing service for $450 million late last year. See, Pandora has a money problem. After paying out streaming music royalties, it doesn’t get to keep much to cover its costs. Meanwhile, its audio ads are only effective if they’re selling something music lovers want.

That’s why it acquired Ticketfly. If Pandora could promote Ticketfly concerts via audo ads played to users listening to those artists, it could earn a lot more revenue. And now with a native app, switching users from Pandora to Ticketfly will be much simpler than delivering them to a mobile website.

Between Ticketfly, WillCall, the corpse of Rdio it acquired, Next Big Sound analytics, and its own radio app, Pandora has plenty of music assets. The challenge will be making them all play in harmony.

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Crunchbase

OverviewTicketfly, a subsidiary of Pandora, is a technology company reimagining the live event experience for promoters and fans. Its powerful ticketing, digital marketing, and analytics software helps promoters sell more tickets, streamline operations, and increase revenue per attendee, while its consumer tools make it easy for fans to find and purchase tickets to great events across North America. Since …

OverviewWillCall curates a list of the best shows happening in your city and makes it easy to buy tickets with just a few taps — no waiting in line or dealing with the box office required. It’s the music discovery and ticketing app for people who want to have fun. A lot of love is put into the shows featured on the WillCall list, so you'll have no excuse to stay home.

OverviewPandora is an online platform and incubator that provides information related to technology, business, communication, and more. It provides users with information related to entrepreneurship, business, information technology, and communications.
It also provides an incubator known as X-incubator for technological startups.